For the John Templeton Foundation, I wrote about the role secret societies might have played in shaping early human societies.
Several thousand years ago in what is now Estonia, a child was buried with a flute made from a bird’s bone and with crane wings placed in his or her hands. Too young to have likely been a shaman or initiate, the child — whose elaborately arranged grave was excavated by archaeologists in the 1970s — was probably a member of a secret society, says Brian Hayden, an anthropologist at Simon Fraser University in British Columbia. In anthropological parlance, secret societies are a type of elite quasi-religious organization seen time and again in cultures that are on the transition point from small, kinship-based egalitarian hunter-gatherer bands into more complex and hierarchical societies.
Although they have been well-studied by ethnographers in places like Melanesia, Sub-Saharan Africa and North America’s Pacific Coast, secret societies were long ignored by archaeologists. In the mid-1990s Hayden began to wonder why so many children’s handprints had been discovered in Paleolithic cave art found in Europe. He encouraged one of his students to do an independent survey of ethnographies detailing children’s ritual roles, and she came back with evidence that children often participated in secret societies. “That turned on the light bulb,” Hayden says. “Nobody in archaeology had really talked about secret societies, but the more I looked into them, the more I became convinced that they were potentially a very powerful factor in cultural and religious development.”